Council for Research
into South-Eastern Europe of the Macedonian Academy of Sciences and Arts

In Greece today
people start from assumption of the "Greek identity of Macedonia as an
obvious historical fact". Identifying the Greeks from the ethnic and
linguistic point of view with the ancient Macedonians, the current Greek
regime accuses "Skopje" of encroaching upon the name Macedonia and on a
part of a cultural heritage which belongs only to the Greeks. In fact
this is nothing more than their conviction which for years now has been
handed out to young people in Greek schools from their earliest years
and, most recently, has been propagated throughout the entire world. The
thesis of the "Greek identity of Macedonia" is not scientifically
supportable. We shall concentrate here on the earliest period.

In Greek scholarship,
in numerous articles and books, the historical facts which go against
the thesis of a "Greek Macedonia" are passed over. It is universally
known that the classical Greek authors did not recognize the Macedonians
as their fellow-countrymen, calling them barbarians, and they considered
Macedonian domination in Greece as an alien rule, imported from outside
by the members of other tribes, the, as Plutarch says, allophyloi. This
historical right and this "Greek identity of Macedonia" have for a long
time been "proved" with the hypothesis that the ancient Macedonians were
a Doric tribe and their language a Doric dialect. Since this could not
be supported by definite facts from historical sources, and even less by
archaeological or linguistic proofs, not long ago official Greek
scholarship discarded this hypothesis. After the deciphering of Linear B
in 1952, and more particularly after 1970. when the luxurious edition of
The History of the Greek Ethnos' was published, Greek linguists and
historians went far into the past to seek for foundations for their
thesis of a "Greek Macedonia". Although none of the Mycenaean scholars
in the world takes seriously their hypothetical interpretations of
Mycenaean texts, they nevertheless wish to discover in them "proofs"
that the ancient Macedonians were Indo-Europeans, Proto-Hellenes, and
that their language was the oldest, purest and most conservative Greek
dialect which at the same time cast a new light on the oldest history of
the Greek ethnos. This thesis reached its culmination at the beginning
of the 1980's when an unusual jubilee under the title of "4,000 Years of
Greek Macedonia" was celebrated with great pomp. The theory thus
constructed has pretensions to scholarship but in fact starts out from
pre-suppositions which are not supported by a single historical fact.

The history of the
ancient Macedonians over a lengthy period of 1,600 years (2,200-600
B.C.) has been reconstructed on the basis of a prejudgement that they
could have been nothing other than Greeks. It should be noted that no
text whatsoever has been preserved in the ancient Macedonian language.
Only about a hundred glosses are known, from which it is not possible to
reconstruct the language. For more than 150 years these words have been
a subject of comparative linguistic studies, but quite a large number of
these remain with only a hypothetical explanation or even with no
explanation at all. While earlier on Doric forms were being sought in
the Macedonian glosses, Greek linguists are now investing great efforts
in revealing archaic Aeolian. Arcado-Cypriot and Mycenaean parallels. In
fact the sparse linguistic material is extremely complex and
heterogeneous. It is clear that among the glosses there are borrowings
from Greek which in antique times was a language of great prestige; the
Greek words, however, have been adapted according to a different,
non-Greek phonetic system, [e.g.: Macedonian and "sky", Greek aither
"air"; Mac. danos, Gk. thanatos "death"; Mac. keb(a)]le Gk. kephale
"head", etc.] But at the same time there are among the glosses such
words as are not found in Greek but have parallels in other
Indo-European languages, [e.g.: aliza "a white layer under the bark of a
tree", Slavonic e/oa xa; Mac. goda "innards", Gk. entera, Old Indian
Sanskrit gudam "intestine"; Mac. pella "stone", Germ. Fels < + pel-sa,
etc.] As proof of the cognation of the ancient Macedonians with the
Greeks a photograph has been presented of the inscription from Vergina
with Greek names. It should be mentioned that the majority of the names
of Macedonians from the ancient period are those of members of the
ruling dynasty or the aristocracy who consciously identified with the
sphere of Hellenic culture so that it is in no way strange that the
names of the majority of them are Greek. But alongside them are to be
found Macedonian names which cannot be explained by means of Greek
etymology.

With regard to their
religion which, it is maintained, was the same as that of the Greeks, it
should be borne in mind that the names of the divinities were translated
into Greek in accordance with their functions, just as the names of the
Greek divinities were altered by Roman authors writing in Latin: Jupiter
in place of Zeus,-Minerva for Athena, Venus for Aphrodite, etc. From an
analysis of the ancient Macedonian glosses it can be concluded that
ancient Macedonian was an Indo-European language distinct from Greek.
The well-known French Indo-European scholar A. Meje says that Greek is
no closer to ancient Macedonian than is any other Indo-European
language. In his classification of the Indo-European languages, J.
Pokorny with complete justification puts Macedonian together with
Phrygian in his Indo-European etymological dictionary. In support of the
thesis that the ancient Macedonians were Greeks it is stressed that
Philip 11 and Alexander the Great not only behaved as Greeks but were
incarnations of the idea of a united Greek state. The state which was
ruled by Philip 11 and Alexander the Great, who subdued the Greek
city-states and extended their frontiers to Central Asia, is nowhere
called a Greek state. Educated by the great Greek philosopher Aristotle,
Alexander highly valued classical Greek education and spread it to
Central Asia. He abandoned, moreover, the dogma of the "difference"
between Greeks and barbarians. He introduced into his policy a new
spirit of the equality of all peoples, a spirit alien even to his
teacher, who had prepared him for leadership of the Greeks and mastery
of the barbarians. In accordance with his cosmopolitan ideology,
Alexander showed an extraordinary broadmindedness both towards the
Greeks and towards the other Balkan and Asiatic peoples. With this
approach he laid the foundations of Hellenism too, which was a mixture
of Greek philosophic and educational ideas with the cultural and
religious understandings of the peoples of the east. Alexander spread
Hellenism in the Greek language, which he considered to be the language
of culture, but his mother tongue was not understood by the Greeks: a
fact of which there are explicit proofs.")

Greek scholarship
passes over with an underestimation the historic fact of the migration
of peoples which fundamentally redrew the ethnic map of Europe, and
especially of the Balkans, during the early Byzantine period. Macedonia
has been represented as a buffer protecting Hellenism from the waves of
the barbarians throughout the centuries. The Slavonic element in Greece
is either denied or minimized and it is well known that the Byzantine
historian Constantine Porphyrogenitus openly says that the whole of
Hellas had been Slavicized - It is likewise a known fact that the
Slavonic tribes of the Ezerites and the Milingi were independent in the
Peloponnese in the 7th and 8th centuries and did not pay tribute to
Byzantium. If such facts are borne in mind, it is not difficult to
understand whether Macedonia at that period was really a "bastion of
Hellenism".

There have been
protests in Greece that we have not used toponyms from the Aegean part
of Macedonia in the forms which were given to them by decree after 1913
and more especially in 1926 because this has called Greek sovereignty
into question. Demelios Georgakas" notes that even today in the
Peloponnese no matter in which direction one moves one cannot go three
miles without encountering a Slavonic place-name. Similar statements
have been made by Ph. Malingudis. If there are so many Slavonic
place-names in the Peloponnese, how many more are there in the Aegean
part of Macedonia where the Slavonic tribes dwelt? And today Slavs have
been living there for a period of 1,400 years. What is more natural than
that the Balkanized Slavs who have lived so long and continuously in
Macedonia should be called Macedonians and their language Macedonian.
During the period of Thucydides (11, 99) the population of Northern
(Upper) Macedonia was distinguished from the Macedonian conquerors; but
even those from Upper Macedonia were likewise called Macedonians. It is
very unscholarly to speak of a homogenization of just one nation in
these regions of the Balkans.